Edison and the Movie Murder Mystery (The Edison Story Part 3)

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26:46And we're back. We watched the Roundhay garden scene 400 more times. Let's get back to Edison now. Okay. When we left Edison, it was early 1888, and he had just told one of his boys, one of his muckers, to go off and invent moving pictures. The guy he told to invent moving pictures was named William Kennedy Laurie Dixon. Four names. Four names, and he liked all four. Yes. He would sign things WKLD. Yes. So a little full of himself, but like also a hustler. Yeah. And an important player in the movie story, as we'll see. So WKLD grew up in England, and when he was like 18 or 19, he actually wrote to Edison to ask for a job, as I'm sure thousands of young hustlers did.

27:38Edison says no, but WKLD comes to the U.S. anyway and eventually does get a job working for Edison. Shows Moxie. Yeah, he's got Moxie. And he is an engineer, but he also is Edison's personal photographer. Of course Edison has a personal photographer. Which, you know, at this point in Edison's life, like, he realizes that he is a brand. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe the most famous person in America. Like it's it's we got to make it clear. Like he's not just like nerds love him. Like everybody knows who he is. Yeah. But I say the word brand because he uses that to get what he wants to to make to make progress, to get money, to get investment, to get his inventions out there and to win.

28:22Like he knows that it's good for business, that whenever something's invented in the middle of the night, he can step in at the last minute and have his personal photographer take a photo of him next to it. Right. By William Kennedy, Laurie Dixon. And, you know, this is part of the reason Edison assigns him moving pictures, right? The kid knows how to use a camera. So remember, this is 1888. By this point, Le Prince has been working for like eight years on the camera. Just a few months after Edison assigns WKLD to work on moving pictures, Edison writes a letter to his patent lawyers. Which I'm contractually obligated to read everything that you tell me to read.

29:01Please, read it. Okay. I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such form as to be both cheap, practical, and convenient. And there's like a little drawing of a machine in the letter. Yes, although that machine is not going to work at all. It's, in fact, when the movie camera is invented, it's not going to be that. It was the poetry of this that was going to get Thomas Edison ahead. So he has not invented the movies, but he's written a thing that kind of sounds like maybe he did.

29:36And when he does, he can say, well, I wrote this beautiful paragraph. Yes, yes. It is a legal gambit. And I just want to note, part of the reason I want to talk about this letter is it's October 8th, 1888. The day that Roundhay Garden scene, that first movie, was filmed is October 14th, 1888. Ah. Same week. So it's not legal precedence. Le Prince already has the patent. But just the vibe of simultaneity is what I want to capture here, right? Like, it is extraordinary how much everybody is working on this. And Edison's first instinct is to get his lawyers to lock it down. Like, put it on paper, file it.

30:20Yes. And what Edison is applying for isn't even a patent. It's this thing called a caveat that is just like, well, I'm not ready for a patent yet, but I got the idea. And so if anybody else tries to get in on it, you got to come check with me. And, you know, you were talking a minute ago about Edison being aware of his own brand and that's serving him. And it certainly did for sales and for raising capital. But it also served him in intellectual property. Like, there's a pretty compelling argument that, like, in the same way that, you know, LeBron James can get away with committing fouls and not getting called the way ordinary players would because he's famous.

30:57And it's like, oh, surely LeBron James wouldn't commit that foul. Like, Edison could do that with patents, right? If a bunch of people have competing claims, which is often the case because simultaneous invention, Edison will get the benefit of the doubt because he's Edison. He's the most famous inventor in the world. Of course, he must have really invented this thing. Yeah, and Le Prince, back in his backyard shed, has to know this, that he is not the most famous guy in this race. And so his motivation is, I need to make it work, and I need to show it to people that it actually works, not just written on a piece of paper like Thomas Edison did.

31:34Yes, yes. Like, everything gets litigated, right? Everything is a race. And so the way you win is not just in court with patents. It's being first to market. being first to show the thing, being first to go in a room and say, hey, look, I built this movie camera. Here is a movie. No one has ever made a movie before. And so Le Prince, yes, he has built his camera and made his movie and has his patents. Now he needs to show it to the world. Okay. The battle is set. The lone inventor versus the most famous man in America. The little guy versus the industrial invention machine. Oh, this would make a great movie.

32:11Yeah, yeah. If they existed yet. Go on. Louis is going to go to New York, right? He's going to have his premiere in Edison's backyard, basically. But first, as you may recall from the beginning of today's show, he's going to go visit his brother in Dijon in France. And it's not exactly clear why, you know, maybe he just wanted to see him. But it is the case that Louis had had some money problems. There was an inheritance, like a house, I think, that they'd inherited from their mother. And so maybe there's some money situation. Classic, going to argue with the family. Classic, classic. So he goes to see his brother in Dijon, gets on a train to Paris, disappears, is never seen again, and let's just do that New York Sun headline one more time.

32:54You know I could do it forever. The Kinetograph, Edison's latest and most surprising device, pure motion, recorded and reproduced. And then Lizzie sees that headline and thinks, Thomas Edison stole my idea and killed my husband. With five pounds of peacock feathers. That's what the 25 pounds of Marlon was for. Ah. Lizzie at the time, because this has taken over her husband's life and now he's missing and sees this, like she has got to be so full of rage. They do have the film, though. Yes, they have the film. They have the camera. It's there in Leeds. And he has a patent, right? So it seems like a robust legal case.

33:35It's obviously not going to bring her husband back, but at least, you know, you could whatever, have his name. Make your move. But there is this element of intellectual property law at the time that is devastating for Lizzie making this case. And that is this. If someone is missing, there is eight years of waiting period before they can be declared dead. And while they're missing, their property, including their intellectual property, is in this kind of limbo. Right? So Louis Le Prince owns this intellectual property, and maybe he's still alive as far as the law is concerned. So in this key moment in the development of movies, Lizzie can't do anything.

34:19She can't bring a case because it's not her intellectual property to sue with. Do we think at this point that Edison has seen the film? I mean, he has his fingers in everything. Yeah. I mean, he would have probably seen the patent, right? Somebody who worked for him would very likely have seen the patent. But as far as I know, not the film. The film is there in the U.K. The big moment was going to be the New York premiere. And remember, this is just like less than a year before that he has disappeared. So Edison has probably not seen the film or the movie camera. And so Lizzie can't do much during this waiting period.

34:49Tell you who can do something. Thomas Edison's invention factory never sleeps. They've already started to work on it and they are going to be relentless. Yes, yes. And so, as you'll remember, William Kennedy, Laurie Dixon, our man is on the job. And, you know, WKLD, he's keeping up with all this stuff that people are doing with all the patents and, in fact, tries to do like a movie projector style movie at some point, but can't get that to work. The film just isn't whatever good enough or clear enough. And so he comes up with this other model instead, which is instead of projecting the movie onto a screen, onto the wall, they build a little box with a little hole in the top.

35:29And you look down into the box like one person and you see a little short movie of like, you know, a strong man lifting weights or whatever. And actually, you know, this fits with Thomas Edison and his strength as a businessman, right? He wasn't looking at the movies as some sort of artistic form that was going to bring the world together kumbaya. Yeah. He was like, well, how do I put something in a box, get someone to put a nickel inside? We'll put my face on it. We'll put it in Coney Island. Yeah. And eventually, like, I will have so many nickels. I can have a big room filled with them in West Orange.

36:00You dive into them like a not very rich Scrooge McDuck. So many nickels, right? And Edison does, in fact, do this. He builds his little money machine and people line up because it is this miraculous thing, moving pictures. And now he actually needs movies to show. It's like, oh, no, we got the box. People are lighting up. We got to show them new movies. So they'll give us more nickels. And in fact, Dixon oversees construction of this movie studio. I think the world's first movie studio, although other people are working on things. And it's this weird building. And it's there in West Orange, right, by the lab.

36:33And it's optimized to get sunlight, right, because early cameras aren't very good. Early lighting is still not that good. They need a lot of light. So they do two things with this building that are just delightful. One, they have like a hinged roof so they can open it up and let the sun shine in. And two, it's on a big like turntable so they can turn it so that the sunlight can come in. It's like a retractable roof stadium. Yeah, crossed with like one of those restaurants at the top of a tall building that spins around. Have you ever been to one of those? I've never been to one. I have been to one of those.

37:02They move very slowly. They move very slowly. You know, I would pay a nickel just to like be in the studio and have it rotate with the sun. Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you've invented the studio tour. Early films include Blacksmith Scene. Ooh, that's a good one. Washing the Baby. Ooh, Oscar nominee. And The Boxing Cats. No way. One of the first movies ever is a cat video. Yeah, and like, this has a very kind of whatever, I don't know, Instagram, TikTok vibes, right? Like Washing the Baby is trad-wise. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Blacksmith, I feel like there must be blacksmith influencers. So Edison's in the movie business, but he doesn't have it to himself for long, right?

37:40This is the simultaneous invention thing again, right? Over the next few years, more and more people are developing their own movie cameras, making their own movies. But of course, Edison is Edison, has, you know, as many lawyers as he wants at his disposal. And so he does what is, I guess, the obvious thing, decides to basically sue everybody else out of existence. Sure, sure, sure. Clear the field. And so, you know, the first few companies, He goes and sues them like, oh, it's Edison. Okay, bye, whatever. We're done. But then he gets this one company that is doing pretty well. It's called the Mutoscope Company.

38:18And by this point, that company, which is Edison's main rival, is run by one William Kennedy Laurie Dixon. WKLD. Who left Edison, I assume. Who left? Who left to go? To go to a competitor. Yeah. Ah, and this is classic. Like, this is a classic moment in the age of innovation, right? It's not just ideas. It's this process knowledge of people who know how to do something and immediately are valuable and can go and start their own business or get hired by someone else. I mean, we saw this at the dawn of Silicon Valley, right? Famously. Yes, it's not. It's not, as you know, the guy who led the invention of the transistor, William Shockley.

38:58It's not even starting his big company, right? Shockley Semiconductor. It's his employees. The traitorous eight. The traitorous eight. I love the traitorous eight. Yeah, they leave, they start their own company, and then they go start Intel. Like, this is how it works. This is simultaneous invention and taking those ideas and really seeding them to a bunch of different companies and competitors. Yes, yes. And in fact, the Mutoscope machines, the machines that Dixon's company is making, are quite like Edison's machines, right? They're not projecting on a screen. They're still, you look into a little box.

39:33and in the UK, the mutoscope machines were known as the What the Butler Saw machines because their most famous movie was you look into this thing and you have the point of view like you're looking through an old school peephole, like a little key lock, you know? And what you see is a woman taking off some of her clothes. Some of her clothes. Some of her clothes. And this was a smash hit. And so... Yeah, of course it was. It was softcore porn. Yes. Which, by the way, so now we're like, whatever, a few years into the history of movies, not a decade into the history of movies, and you have, like, cat videos and softcore porn.

40:08So you can basically shut it down now. No more innovation. That's it. That's the thing that drives innovation, frankly, right? Yeah, classic story of video, right? The porn industry and, like, video, the Internet. Also, the Mutoscope, it turns out. So, okay, Edison sues Mutoscope. Mutoscope does not roll over. They hire their own lawyers, And their lawyer's legal strategy is to prove that Edison was not the first person to invent moving pictures. Because they know who was. Louis Le Prince. Yes. Louis Le Prince did it. His patent is right there, you know, for everybody to see. He's not there, but his patent is.

40:49His patent is. And the mutoscope lawyers get in touch with Lizzie, you know, Louis' wife, and Adolf, his son. And, you know, like this to them feels like their moment, right? Like they're just two people. There's no way they're going to be able to go up against Edison. But Mutoscope is a real company with revenues. And so Adolf gets ready to testify. He goes back to England. He gets the camera, the machine. He takes the Roundhead garden scene and like paste the images onto like, you know, board so they can have it in court. He gets like sworn statements from people who were working with him. And the family of Louis Leprince can finally get this confrontation in a courtroom with, I assume, reporters there, the trial of the century.

41:33Yeah, I mean, it's the Edison, right? You know it's going to be in the papers because Edison is involved, right? So the trial happens. Adolf, in fact, gets called to testify. And the mutoscope lawyer asks him, do you have any films from this camera that your father invented? And Adolf, you know, shows the pictures of the Roundhay garden scene, which you remember he was in it and his grandparents were in it. And then the lawyer says, when were these photographs taken? And Adolf says, October 1888, which again is, you know, well before Edison had his claim. And then the lawyer for Edison, like I guess in cross-examination, says to Adolf, well, there's no way you can prove that October 1888 is when the movie was filmed.

42:19These are just pictures. And Adolf says, I can fix the date exactly by the fact that my grandmother, who remember was in the movie, by the fact that my grandmother died on the 24th of October, 1888. Courtroom gasps. And yet, and yet, it doesn't really work out for Adolf and Lizzie. This is the high point for them. But, you know, it becomes clear that, you know, the mutoscope lawyers are not there to validate the claim of Louis Leprince. In fact, at some level, they don't want, like, you know, Leprince's heirs, they don't want Adolf and Lizzie to be able to, like, take away the movies from them.

43:00So they want to, like, do enough to undermine Edison. Sure. But not so much that they undermine themselves. Like, they don't even want to see the camera. And then there are these details where, like, Louis' U.S. patent was for the 16 lens camera and not the one lens camera, and they don't want to know about that. And so ultimately, ultimately, Adolph and Lizzie don't get the victory they won. And afterwards, people aren't putting up statues to Louis Le Prince and putting them in the textbooks as like this huge inventor. I mean, he kind of gets lost to time. He gets totally lost. And the court case, as intellectual property cases tend to do, goes on forever, right?

43:37It goes on for years and years, back and forth. The end of this Edison versus Mutoscope case is this very strange-to-me outcome, and that's this. The two companies get to keep their intellectual property, and everybody else gets sort of wiped away. It's like, okay, you two, whatever. We're not going to sort it out between you two, but you two are good. You guys can keep making movies. And so what Edison and Mutoscope decide to do, once there's only two, what do you do if it's whatever, 1900-ish? You form a trust. You're like, you know what? We could just compete each other down to bits, or we could just team up and not have to compete and share all those nickels.

44:17Edison's got like a playbook. You either invent it first or you patent it first or you get the caveat or you sue everybody. And, you know, if it looks like you're not going to win, you just say, let's get together. Like, let's dominate this industry. And in this particular case, they dominated the technology. They were making the movies. They had this like vertical corporation they were inventing. Yes. And, you know, they really locked down not just the cameras and the projectors, but the whole industry. They actually bring in to their trust, it's called the Motion Picture Patents Company is the official name.

44:51They bring into their trust Kodak because Kodak is making the film, right? And they already have their studio, so the actors are working for them. And this Edison Trust dominates, just dominates the early movie business. And, delightful twist, this dominance helps to create Hollywood. So Hollywood the place? I mean, yes, but also like Hollywood, the idea, the movie industry as we know it. Okay. So here's what happened. So the people who are buying from the Edison Trust are theater owners, right? They are not in the cartel. They are the ones paying the cartel. Yes. And they are not like big, highly capitalized ventures, right?

45:33These are like basically immigrant hustlers, guys who were like in the fur business a year ago. Yeah, they're real estate guys, right? They own a thing. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Maybe they have like a vaudeville theater, right? And they realize like, oh, so having to pay the actors, we could just put a movie up there and people will still pay. Right. And so they really come to resent this Edison trust. Well, of course, because like buying from a cartel is terrible. You have no negotiation fee. They can lock you out of the business. They can put you out of business if you don't buy what they're asking for.

46:02Yeah, it's great to be a cartel. It's terrible to be the customer of a cartel. Exactly right. Not only because they can jack up prices, right, but also because they can sell you a crap product. You know, like, you're not going to buy from anybody else. They don't have any incentive to make a better movie. Yeah, and that's an unappreciated danger of a monopoly, right? Yes, yes. Is that we always talk about the money. Oh, I'm going to have to pay more for this monopoly. But it's really that there's no reason for the monopoly to innovate. Like, why would the movies have to be better or longer or nicely lit, you know, or something beyond what the butlers are?

46:36You don't have to innovate at all. Yeah. And I mean, conversely, like the other side of the same coin is like competition is core to why a market economy is great. Yes. Right. Like you want many people, firms competing to make something better. You want five different companies, 20 different companies trying to make a better movie to sell it to the movie theaters. And when there's a cartel, you don't have that. So how do they get to Hollywood? Right. So just distance from the New York cartel? So it's part of it. Right. So here's what happens. The theater owners who are the ones getting jammed by the cartel, they start making their own movies, but doing it on the sly.

47:17There are these stories where like they'll like have an Edison camera there, but then have secretly like one of the band cameras or a camera from Europe or something on the side. And, you know, part of trying to avoid the Edison Trust, which is headquartered in, you know, New Jersey, New York, is let's go far away. Like, how far away can you get? And the answer in the United States, just look at a map, continental United States, Southern California. And plenty of that sun they need. Yeah. So, right. So it's not just Edison. We should be clear. Like, there were a few other things. There was plenty of sun.

47:51Land was cheap. So you could, you know, buy your studio lot for cheap. There were lots of different landscapes. So you could film like your Western out of the desert. You could go to the mountains. You could go to the beach. And they weren't just hiding, right? Like they were suing. There were antitrust laws. And, you know, we're into the kind of 1900s, 1910s at this point. And this is a moment when finally the antitrust laws that have been on the books for decades are finally starting to be enforced in a meaningful way. And there are these Supreme Court decisions in 1917 and 1918 that say, oh, yeah, it's the Edison Trust is a trust.

48:28And we have these antitrust laws. You can't have a cartel. It's right there in the name. It's right there in the name. And they break up the trust. Yeah. And that's basically the end of Edison in the movie business and the beginning of Hollywood. We still have one thread to pick up. What happened to Louis Le Prince? Yes. And we're going to tell the rest of the Edison story. in just a minute.

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51:55That's the end of the ads. Robert, give us an outline for the rest of the show. Okay. Three things we have left to do today. One, figure out what to make of Louis Le Prince and Edison in the movies. Like, what's our lesson here? Number two, we're going to do the true crime thing. We're going to figure out who killed Louis Le Prince. That's good, good. And three, we're going to end our Edison series and talk about the end of Edison's life. Okay, so first on that list is what to make of Edison and Le Prince in the movies. Like, what is this story really about? And on this one, I want to go to Schumpeter.

52:31I thought it was Schumpeter, but I looked it up. It's Schumpeter. Joseph Schumpeter. Wow, I've never said it like that. Yeah. Joseph Schumpeter, also known as Schumpeter in Silicon Valley, where they love this guy. Creative destruction. If you've heard that term, that's what he came up with and is still cited to this day. The idea that in order for progress to be made, big companies often fail and young scrappy companies come up and take their place. And so for Schumpeter, the sort of key hero was the entrepreneur. And there's this thing he wrote in 1911 that distinguished the inventor from the entrepreneur, talked about how they're different.

53:12And I think that distinction is the key for me in understanding this story and understanding Louis Le Prince, definitely the inventor, and Edison, who is clearly an inventor but is also an entrepreneur. So read, Robert, read, if you would, this little thing that I pulled. It's quoting time. As long as they are not carried into practice, inventions are economically irrelevant. And to carry an improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it. And a task, moreover, requiring entirely different kinds of aptitudes. It is therefore not advisable, and it might be downright misleading to stress the element of invention as much as many writers do.

53:54It's not about the invention. And it's interesting, like that last part, as much as many writers do, right? So he's sort of distinguishing here between what's happening with technology, with the economy, and how do we tell the story, right? And he's saying the story, the writing of it is like the invention. Of course. The person discovering the thing. But he's also saying, like, that's only one piece of it. And making the invention a thing in the world, a thing in the world that people will pay for, is hugely important and super underrated. And, you know, if you map that idea to this story, you can say, well, so what that Louis Le Prince came up with the movie camera first, right?

54:37Everybody was working on it. Someone was going to do it in the next year or two. Yeah, somebody was going to do it. What's important is, in Schumpeter's words, carrying it into practice, making it a thing in the world. You know, would Le Prince have done that if he had survived? Maybe, but maybe not, right? Like, that part is hard. He didn't have any money. We do know that Edison was really good at making things real. The branding, the manufacturing, the money part, the lawyers, the patents, the building of the studio that could rotate feels like the kind of practical, like, we need to solve a problem and we need to film in New Jersey.

55:12And this is what we've come up with. Yeah, I mean, go back to that letter that you read that he wrote in October of 1888 when he just started working on this. You know, in the very first sentence, he says, yeah, we want to invent whatever, a camera. But then he says in that first sentence, a camera in such a form as to be both cheap, practical and convenient. Right. Like first sentence. He's not like, oh, movies going to change the world. He's like, I want to make a thing that is cheap, practical and convenient. That is the entrepreneur. This actually reminds me of the discussion we're having today about China.

55:47Because, right, there's a whole thing about, well, China, like, do they really invent anything? We're the United States of America. We are the inventors. But what they have is process knowledge. They have what Schumpeter's talking about, focusing on cheap, practical, and convenient applications of technology. And through that constant iteration can often come out ahead without the aha lone inventor moment. Yeah. Fast follower? Is that fast follower? Is that what they call that? Yeah. So think about Edison in this context, right? Like he didn't just want to invent the light bulb. He wanted to deliver electric power to millions of people cheaply, you know, at scale.

56:25And he did. So he was definitely an entrepreneur. I mean, also, he was a flawed entrepreneur, right? Like he invented the phonograph, unlike with this. Like phonograph, he was way out in front and like was not the first one to bring it to market because he got distracted. He was the first one to build a big electric grid, but bet on the wrong kind of current, right, as we talked about. But fundamentally, he was an entrepreneur. And I would argue that that's why he is so famous as an inventor, right? Because we love stories of inventors, but we want stories of inventors whose things get out into the world.

57:00And so by being such a good entrepreneur, Edison became the most famous inventor in history. This is where we will leave Edison for a moment. And let's move to number two, Louis Le Prince. Who killed him? It was probably not Thomas Alva Edison. It was probably not Thomas Alva Edison. So for this one, I go back to Paul Fisher, the guy who wrote this relatively recent book about Louis Le Prince. And when I talked to Paul Fisher, we actually got into who killed Louis Le Prince in some detail. He has a pretty compelling theory. And it goes like this. The last thing we know Louis Le Prince did was he went to visit his brother.

57:35In Dijon. In Dijon. Famous for their mustard? Yes, I guess so. You know, there was this inheritance, right, that was something of an issue between them. The brother is the last one ever to see him alive. And then after he disappears, Lizzie's like, what should we do? Should we take out ads in the papers and, you know, see if anybody's seen him? And the brother says, no, no, I'm taking out ads in the papers. Don't worry. But when Paul Fisher, this author, went back to look in the papers, no ads. And so, like, that one seems pretty compelling to me. It was the brother. It was the brother, probably because of money.

58:14Like, boring, but boring is what you want, right? It's like the Occam's razor answer. And I guess if Thomas Edison were listening to this show, he'd be like, yeah, of course. Like, I have lawyers. I don't need to kill people. That's right. That's why you get rich. That's why you become Thomas Edison, so you could take their ideas without killing them. So that's the end of the movie story. and it seems like maybe this is the end of the series, right? So let's just do the rest of his life. Like, what is left for Thomas Edison to do at this point? I mean, it's interesting, right? Because he's in his 40s when he gets into the movie business, like prime of his life.

58:49And he certainly doesn't feel like he's done. He's not done. He, for decades after this, keeps working. I mean, he's super famous. And he works on lots of different things. He works on a new kind of battery, still working on an electric car. He gets into the cement business. It's the Edison Cement Works or something. And actually pours these concrete houses in New Jersey. He has this dream for the concrete house. I think you can still see some of these houses. He tries like 17 ,000 different plants looking for a domestic source of rubber. Rubber so you don't have to go to the Amazon. Yeah, right.

59:23This was like a national security concern at that time. Like, I don't know, like rare earths today or something, but bigger. But none of these, I mean, like he makes some technical progress on them, but none of them are like big breakthroughs. He stays famous, right? Famous enough that remember like when he dies in 1931, the president of the United States declares this national moment of mourning. But if we take Edison by his own measure, you know, his own measure was not incremental progress, not the ideas for ideas themselves. It was things people will pay for. It was things that become a big thing in the world.

1:00:00In the second half of his life, he doesn't have any big heads. But still, you really just have to step back and say, not only did he invent all these things, he created at least three industries, entire transformative industries, a photograph in the recording industry, the movie business, the electric business, which is in everything. Yeah, like electricity was like the fundamental transformative technology of the 20th century. We can say Thomas Edison had a very good run. I mean, without Thomas Edison, you couldn't have like two guys talking into microphones and calling it a job. Our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.

1:00:43Our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. And our showrunner is Ryan Dilley. I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. We'll be back next week with another episode of Business History. A show about the history. wait for it, of business. Robert Smith, as you know, there is nowhere in Pushkin's office to make a video, to make a video podcast, which is unfortunate. We tried and it was described as two gray men in a gray box. And reasonably so. Fortunately for us, in an amazing coincidence, literally down the hall from Pushkin's office, there is the showroom of a company called Buzzy Space. This is a company, it's where we're sitting right now.

1:01:23And what they do is they design furniture and acoustic solutions that make, I'm reading here, workplaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. I would even say cozy. Their furniture is like sort of curved and interesting colors and I guess keeps things quiet. Yes. Honestly, I wish our office was this showroom. You can find more at Buzzy.space. That's B-U-Z-Z-I dot space. Did you ever notice how you spend hours shopping online only to pause at checkout because you wonder if you trusted enough to hit buy now? Agentic Commerce is testing that moment more than ever. That's where PayPal comes in.

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